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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the perception-is-all-there-is. dept.

Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues that evolution has cloaked us in a perceptional virtual reality. For our own good.

The idea that we can't perceive objective reality in totality isn't new. We know everyone comes installed with cognitive biases and ego defense mechanisms. Our senses can be tricked by mirages and magicians. And for every person who sees a duck, another sees a rabbit.

But Hoffman's hypothesis, which he wrote about in a recent issue of New Scientist, takes it a step further. He argues our perceptions don't contain the slightest approximation of reality; rather, they evolved to feed us a collective delusion to improve our fitness.

Using evolutionary game theory, Hoffman and his collaborators created computer simulations to observe how "truth strategies" (which see objective reality as is) compared with "pay-off strategies" (which focus on survival value). The simulations put organisms in an environment with a resource necessary to survival but only in Goldilocks proportions.

Consider water. Too much water, the organism drowns. Too little, it dies of thirst. Between these extremes, the organism slakes its thirst and lives on to breed another day.

Truth-strategy organisms who see the water level on a color scale — from red for low to green for high — see the reality of the water level. However, they don't know whether the water level is high enough to kill them. Pay-off-strategy organisms, conversely, simply see red when water levels would kill them and green for levels that won't. They are better equipped to survive.

"Evolution ruthlessly selects against truth strategies and for pay-off strategies," writes Hoffman. "An organism that sees objective reality is always less fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees fitness pay-offs. Seeing objective reality will make you extinct."

Since humans aren't extinct, the simulation suggests we see an approximation of reality that shows us what we need to see, not how things really are.

Meanwhile, European researchers say Objective reality may not exist. At least, on the subatomic scale.


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:27PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:27PM (#951394) Journal

    "I'm denying that there is such a thing in objective reality as an electron with a position.

    And so does quantum mechanics. But unlike this vague consciousness-all-the-way-down idea, quantum mechanics can tell us exactly what it means that an electron does not have a position, when and to what degree it is nevertheless possible to pretend it does, and what to expect when pretending that it has a definitive position is not possible. Including the case when “there is an electron” itself is a statement that is neither true nor false.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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